What, FontLab is supposed to magically find the text outline glyphs in the font and delete them and replace them by equivalent French translations, spacing, abbreviating, and centring them appropriately and accurately?
No, you wouldn't be able to apply this retroactively to the existing Last Resort font, but if you had conceived the project with multiple localised versions in mind you might have used this approach. You would need to be able to access FontLab's Vector Paint / Text tool through Python; I'm not sure if this is currently possible, but Yuri is pretty good about adding features that people ask for. Then you would set up a database or spreadsheet with your Unicode range and name data, and probably generate from this a comma-separated values input file that Python could interpret within FontLab. Basically, the idea would be that FontLab would associate strings in the input file with specific glyphs, would activate the Vector Paint / Text tool to create the strings, e.g. Unicode block names, as outlines based on an existing text font. Positioning such elements is probably the easiest part of the whole process. You could also put in and appropriate scale sample glyphs from each block, again derived from existing fonts, although this might depend on the encoding (I'm not sure how well the Vector Paint / Text tool handles non-ASCII).
None of this is trivial, and I think the programming expense would only be justified if you were intending to make substantial use of the script, e.g. to make many different localised versions of something like the Last Resort font to tailor the script to other, similar projects. The more repetition a task involves, the greater the benefit of scripting.
John Hudson
Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com Vancouver, BC [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Theory set out to produce texts that could not be processed successfully
by the commonsensical assumptions that ordinary language puts into play.
There are texts of theory that resist meaning so powerfully ... that the
very process of failing to comprehend the text is part of what it has to offer
- Lentricchia & Mclaughlin, _Critical terms for literary study_
